Saturday, January 16, 2016

The second week of the new year begins
with shocking news that rock's renaissance man, David Bowie, died of
cancer. Mr. Bowie was 69.

Whatever his artistic merits or
legacy, and his music and movies are certainly indelible in my life,
Mr. Bowie's body of work is astonishing for a few reasons. Though he
reportedly struggled with addiction, mental illness and serious
conflicts -- he apparently favored the work of his post-addiction
Berlin period (Low, "Heroes", Lodger) -- David Bowie was singularly
dedicated to making music.

Rock is not the first thing I
seek out when I am in the mood to listen to music, so the enormity of
Bowie's death to so many people was lost on me at first. But I soon
after learned that he wrote his newly-released album knowing full well
that he was dying, which I had to respect. And then, a tribute to
Bowie on a jazz station helped me realize his great influence, in part
by causing me to realize that several songs I vaguely remembered from
various times of my life were his. The commentary on the music was
top-notch, too, and allowed me to fully appreciate a couple for the
first time.

Weekend Reading

"[D]on't
pretend that refusing to dispose of things you don't need will somehow
help somebody else." -- Michael Hurd, in "Post-Christmas Letdown?"
at The Delaware Wave

"Perhaps you have watched what Uber has done to the taxi business?"
-- Keith Weiner, in "Open
Letter to the Banks" at SNB & CHF

"The best way to deal with a bully is to ignore him, thus giving him
psychological invisibility and invalidation." -- Michael
Hurd, in "Bullies in School and Around
the World" at The Delaware Coast Press

"The truth is Apple is powered mostly by coal and other fossil fuels,
but rather than tell Americans the truth -- that their amazing
technological achievements are made possible by fossil fuels -- they
are cooking their energy books in order to dupe us into believing that
we can have innovators like Apple without the cheap, plentiful,
reliable energy provided by the fossil fuel industry." -- Alex
Epstein, in "The
Truth About Apple's '100% Renewable' Energy Usage"
at Forbes

Alex
Epstein's takedown of Apple -- a company whose politically correct
snootiness has always annoyed me -- is both humorous and
informative. I enjoyed the following analogy:

Think of it
this way. Imagine you and 9 other people are traveling on a yacht that
has both sails and a diesel engine. For the 10% of the time that the
wind was blowing perfectly in the right direction, the yacht would use
the sails. For the other 90% of the time, the diesel engine would do
the heavy lifting. Now imagine that, after the trip, you want to claim
that you traveled the entire distance by sail, so you pay every other
passenger $10 for the right to claim that you used their 10% sail
time. You get to claim that you sailed 100% of time, while the other
passengers have to say they used the "dirty" diesel engine for their
entire trip. That's basically what Apple is doing with their energy
accounting sleight of hand. [link dropped]

Of course, the
silver lining here is that, thanks to its decision to pander to
leftists, customers who now know better will have a good "in" with
fellow Mac enthusiasts to do a bit of debunkery.

Heh! Atlas
Shivered

Stop
byMcSweeney's for a few more "Classic Book Titles Adjusted
for Winter."